ok this is going to be 2 posts.
my dad is in a writing group at his retirement community and often writes nice stories about his war experience. he asks me to type them for him. so im over there now and i just finished. its a sweet story. check it out:
My Silver Chain
It did not take long for Japan, after Pearl Harbor on December 1941, to strike out at the rest of the world. It started out with the Philippines, the archipelago to the south of Japan. The American army established there to watch Japan was quickly overrun.
The result was the march of Bataan. It was the most cruel and inhumane convoy of American soldiers forced to walk their way into imprisonment. General MacArthur was the commander in charge and managed to escape by plane, uttering the famous words, “I shall return.”
From the Philippines it was a short travel to the mainland and Burma. Burma was quickly conquered. The memory of it was covered after the war by the movie named The Bridge Over the River Kwai.
From Burma they went to Singapore and forced the British to surrender. Finally Japanese forces arrived in the Dutch East Indies, which is now Indonesia. By the end of March, only four months after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese had managed to occupy four different countries with little or no resistance.
The Dutch East Indies were the real prize for Japan. Not only was the country rich with a booming economy, but it had the one commodity Japan did not have and that was oil.
Japan had tens of thousands of airplanes, a navy with huge aircraft carriers and destroyers and an army with thousands of tanks and trucks. They all demanded oil and lots of it.
The Dutch East Indies had been a major target for Japan and they had every intention of keeping it. Forever! The problem was how to get rid of the Dutch. Half a million of them.
We hated the Japanese. They spoke a strange language and had a strange religion. It seemed laughably primitive to us that they considered their nation’s leader, Emperor Hirohito, a God. Everywhere in town they had posted lifesize pictures of Hirohito that we were forced to bow to. If we refused to do so we would be beaten.
The Japanese soldiers would always walk in pairs with their guns slung over their shoulders. They would check to make sure we were flying the Japanese flag, a large red circle on a white field symbolizing the rising sun.
We were afraid of them! They would often enter people’s homes looking for alcohol and jewels, without speaking a word, opening closets and doors and slamming them shut after throwing the contents on the floor.
The first time they did this to my mother, brother and I (my father was a POW) we huddled in the living room quiet and speechless, shaking with fear and relieved when they left without hurting us. After they were gone my mother took all the alcohol in the house and disposed of it in the toilet. The empty bottles were buried in a hole in the yard.
About a year prior to this my father had given me his pocketwatch that had broken down. He had decided to replace it with a wristwatch. Attached to the pocketwatch was a silver chain about a foot long. That silver chain was a treasure and my only piece of jewelry. No way was any Japanese soldier going to take that chain from me. I had to hide it, but where? I came up with an original idea that I thought was foolproof. I found an empty glass aspirin tube that was sealed with a cork. I carefully placed my silver chain inside and sealed it with the cork.
Now I had the problem of hiding that tube where the Japanese could not find it. I came up with a solution! Outside our home on the side of the street was a nutmeg tree. About six feet up it branched out into two parts. Where the branches separated there was a tiny hole. I waited for nightfall then I climbed up the tree and deposited the the aspirin tube with my silver chain into the small hole. I was convinced that no Japanese soldier would ever find my hiding spot.
That was 1942. As far as I know my silver chain is still safely hidden in that tree.